Writer of Various Things

Sh*t Just Takes That Long.

Read this article in The Atlantic yesterday about the development of Toy Story. To summarize, from first draft to green-light took three years, what looks like at least a dozen incarnations of the script, and a whole team of writers and execs who were getting paid to work on it.

I think this makes me feel both better and worse about my own situation as I head into the third start on the third draft of a screenplay I’m working on in the third year of working on it.

On the “better” side, I am clearly not entirely a loser for taking this long, because it takes Pixar just as long to write the story they want.

On the “worse” side, even if I’m not a loser, it doesn’t mean that what I come up with in three years or even ten years, will even be on the same mountainside with the quality of Toy Story. And I don’t have a team of brilliant minds or development funds to make it any more likely.